I got up early and walked down to that depot before the first train, because I meant to be standing on that platform when it arrived, with the truth in my hand.
Because that supervisor with his budget, so eager to run the veterans off, never thought to check the kid he put on the booth, and never knew the platform camera records to a system the old station clerk set up decades ago, one he had no idea how to reach.
The clerk pulled it for me before dawn, and the footage from the night the fare box came up short showed the booth kid lifting the cash while a train was boarding, the boy the supervisor accused no one but me over.
I copied it, and put on my good shirt, and I waited for the send-off Friday, because the regional office was coming down, and they were the ones who could set it right.
The send-off was on the platform, fitting enough, the regional people all smiles and handshakes for my thirty-three years. When the supervisor stepped up to say his few words, I asked the regional office if they would see something first.
I played it, right there where everyone waits for the midnight line. The kid. The fare box. The date.
The regional office went very still. The supervisor had run off a thirty-three-year man and tried to have him cuffed on a platform full of passengers, over money a boy he hired had taken. He did not have his job by the end of the day.
They cleared my record and asked me back to the window as long as I care to work it. My hands are slower now, but I can still hold a soldier bag while he finds his ticket, still sit with the lonely travelers through the long wait for the late train.
The kid answered for the fare box. The transit police the supervisor threatened me with never came for me.
The young folks coming up watched the whole thing, and I hope they learned what I learned the hard way. Keep your own records. Trust your own hands. And when someone with a title tries to make you carry the blame for what they will not even look into, do not sign a thing until the truth has had its say. The truth is slow sometimes. But it keeps.
Thirty-three years I was the one at that window, first train to last. I once bought a runaway girl passage home to her mama out of my own pocket. It turned out the depot looked after me too, through an old camera a careless man never knew to look for.